Thursday, January 05, 2006

the agony of defeat

I am haunted by a persistent memory from my childhood: the spectre of Dan Haggerty on the Battle of the Network Stars. He was heroic on the tug-of-war fields, gamely biting his lip in a passion germane to the era and long lost in this age of irony; but alas, he met his match in the form of that infernal technological monstrosity: the pinball machine. Howard Cosell offered instant exegesis as Haggerty stared up at the inhuman beast: the mountain man, blessed of human strength and Emersonian self-reliance, was felled by modernity. And that's the story of the Unabomber.